Finkel at his best

That thought went through my head watching the game tonight. The wheels fell off of the whole thing tonight and it wasn’t fun or exciting to watch most of the game.

Amid all of the doom and gloom, I really feel bad for the student athletes who are out there giving it their all for the entire game. With four students suspended, Monmouth is down to an eight man team. That’s tough for any team to overcome, I don’t care who they are. However, over the last few home games I’ve noticed that there’s something missing from the Monmouth team – there’s a spark missing, there’s an excitement missing, there’s an aggressive determination to win at all costs missing – hell, there’s a student cheering section missing!

Something’s not right in West Long Branch.

Something needs to be done. I don’t know what because I admit that I don’t know enough about running a Division 1 basketball program to know how to bring in what’s missing. But I do know enough to know that these games are getting sadder and sadder.

You can get all of the stats for the game on the official Hawks website. There are 32 pictures of the game below. Enjoy!

Mike Myers Keitt on defense

I’m not into the blame game so I don’t know if it was a coaching issue or the fact that the Haws are down four players in their rotation or whatever. What I do know, though, is that the team simply got outplayed tonight. Look – sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and tonight, the Hawks appeared to be outplayed by a decent Sacred Heart team. I have to stress, though, that the Pioneers were a “decent” team – not the type of team where you have to call someone up and tell them, “Oh my God! These guys are AMAZING!!!” But a decent team nonetheless.

So far this season, what I’ve found interesting while watching the Hawks is that they tend to play to their competition’s level. When they played against Villanova they had moments of real greatness where, as a fan in the audience, I was extremely impressed. When they played against Quinnipiac the Hawks looked like they should have been ranked the number one team in the conference. And just 48 hours after that great performance against the Bobcats, the Hawks played down a little bit (sure, exhaustion had to play into it, too) and they wound up getting routed at home in front of more than 850 fans.

By the way, 850+ fans in bad weather – nice showing!

The Monmouth Hawks website has some quotes from after the game and I think Head Coach Dave Calloway hit the nail right on the head with this one about the poor defense tonight:

We were just not good enough on the defensive end. I thought we scored enough points, but we gave up too many. We gave up 51 points in the second half and you aren’t going to win many games if you give up that many points.

Here’s hoping that things turnaround for the Hawks – and soon. I’ve got 32 pictures from the game below for you to peruse through at your leisure. I kept the same close up/larger style that I had in the Quinnipiac pictures since I thought that they looked pretty good. I hope that you enjoy them!

Who knows?

Jesse Steele and the Hawks on defense

In any event, I do have some thoughts on last night’s game. First, I can’t tell you enough how impressed I was with the Monmouth players after all of the crap that they’ve had to deal with in the last week.

I think that Quinnipiac might have been a little bit better conditioned than some of the Monmouth squad, but the Bobcats also had the ability to sub in more players more frequently. Although, I’m not sure if it was such a bad thing that Monmouth didn’t have a large pool of players to draw from on the bench. At some point last night it seemed like there was some cohesion and energy among the five active Monmouth players and part of me wants to believe that was because they were able to play together for longer periods of time. However, there was one point when Mike Myers Keitt – Monmouth’s leading scorer last night – motioned to his bench that he needed to be taken out for a moment.

But what do I know? I’m just a guy sitting in the crowd.

Tony Graham at the Hawks Nest has a good review of the game with some quotes from all of the gang. For example, since Monmouth missed five foull shots in a row, most folks who watched last night’s game came away saying, “What was the deal with those foul shots at the end?! Come on, Monmouth!” Well, Head Coach Dave Calloway addresses the foul shot issue on the Hawks Nest:

“If you make three more foul shots along the way it’s a different game,” Calloway said. “There’s lots of things we did well in the game but there’s lots of things to work on.”

And the coach is right – you sink those five foul shots in a row and Monmouth wins 75 – 73. But playing that type of second guessing game probably isn’t the most productive use of one’s time. Kevin O’Rourke over at the New Jersey Newsroom’s Pressbox put up some additional quotes from Coach Calloway including:

“We’ve had a lot of games that have gone that way this year, down to the last possession and you come up one short, one possession short,” Calloway said. “We’ll look back at the tape tonight and re-hash some of those possessions, especially the last couple of minutes. If we could have done one thing better, we win the game.”

That seems like a better use of time and efforts, don’t you think? And maybe someone can figure out how in the world Monmouth had 17 turnovers last night. Aside from those foul shots, if the team doesn’t turn the ball over so much, then you have a completely different game. Or, as one the assistant coaches kept yelling last night – if the opposition doesn’t score on the turnover, you essentially negate the impact of turning the ball over. Monmouth wasn’t able to prevent Quinnipiac from scoring on some of those turnovers and do you know what that gives you? A heartbreaking loss at home.

Anyway, below are some 44 pictures from the game last night. And hey – I normally adjust the pictures to be 800 pixels on their largest side (i.e. the pictures are never larger than 800 pixels on any one side). This time around, I tried taking pictures in a slightly different style with more zooming and less wide shots. Also, I adjusted the settings on the pictures so that the largest side is now 1024 pixels. In other words, if you’re looking for a little more detail than usual, these pictures should give you what you want. Let me know if you like the changes and I’ll keep this style of pictures for future home games. Enjoy!